Collaborative teams are often formed to brainstorm and produce some type of output. For example, collaborative teams can work together to in a creative environment to develop a layout of a website or to define a business process. Early stages of discussion in creative environments often benefit from a “pen and packing paper” approach, during which team members each contribute to the collaborative effort using traditional brainstorming tools such as a whiteboard, markers, pens and sticky notes.
In some situations, members of a collaborative team can be remotely located from one another. For example, one or more team members can be working at a first location and one or more team members can be working at a second location that is some distance from the first location (e.g., on a different continent). Collaboration tools have been developed to enable remotely located team members to partake in collaborative efforts. Such traditional tools, however, do not enable team members to use the above-mentioned traditional brainstorming tools to share information and collaborate with other team members at remotes locations. Consequently, team members that are virtually participating in a collaborative exercise are practically blind to events once the activity begins.